Abstract
Emil Tode's remarkable novel Border State is part of a wave of post-1989 fiction (in literature and cinema) from the post-communist realm of Europe that explores persistent divides in the continent, even when the actual Cold War border is no longer there. Contrary to grandiloquent talk in geopolitics suggesting a regained freedom of movement, these fictions have their protagonists travel between Eastern and Western Europe in a secretive way, as trespassers and stowaways, as if the old divide is still effective. The best known example might be Krzystof Kieślowski's movie Blanc (1994), part of the Trois Couleurs-trilogy, in which the main hero Karol Karol, a former champion hairdresser and now the financially broke, sexually impotent lover to his French ex-wife, flies back to Warsaw from Paris hiding in a suitcase.Footnote1 In the case of the novel under scrutiny here, Border State, first published in 1993 in Tallinn, Estonia, we are presented with a fugitive, a murderer, who confesses to his crime in letters sent to a certain Angelo, who might very well be an invented addressee. The victim is Franz, resident of Paris, where the murder also takes place, and a Franco-German professor of philosophy. The murderer is from Eastern Europe, probably from Estonia - but just probably -, which saw its independence newly restored in 1991. As a translator of French poetry he is visiting France on a EU-scholarship. The motive for the murder is quite vague: the I is disenchanted with the free, capitalist West; especially with the nihilism that, as he discovers, seems to be at the heart of the European project of political integration. His victim, also his lover, embodies the failure to deliver a bright, new European future.
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